from the five physical senses to awaken inner vision, the dormant faculty of gnosis that perennial philosophers call
Dolphin scientist John Lilly wrote about his visionary experiences inside of isolation tanks, using LSD as a catalyst. At age nineteen I was inspired by the intrepid adventures of Lilly, which I had read about in his books
It was a fine spring day in early June. I cultivated a sense of gratitude and reverence while I disrobed and settled into the warm environment of the isolation tank chamber, closing the door. Lying back, supported by the buoyant body-temperature saline solution, I began to let go. I breathed deeply, gently, working out some body kinks. I was already comfortable with the process, having had a few previous experiences in the tank. This time, of course, I was aware that within forty-five minutes or so the LSD would start having an effect. Pure darkness, at this point, appeared like a flat screen with no depth, but by the end of my voyage that flat screen would be radically enlarged. Images and sounds of the day, of driving into Chicago, popped into my mind. I breathed and let go. It took fifteen to twenty minutes before this sensory detritus of the day’s impressions began to fade and an inner vista began to dawn. My heartbeat was present for me; my rhythmic breathing took on a distant, autonomous quality. I allowed myself to disengage from fidgeting and readjusting my body; there was nothing really to do in this regard, I told myself as I was floating in a perfectly safe ocean of comfort. The quietude was complete.
My mind began to seek reinforcing boundaries of my body, which usually come from pressure, gravity, and contact with clothes or a chair. But here there were no sensory signals to be found, so my mind decided that no body limitation existed and began to reach beyond. The mind, I found, has the innate capacity to reach outward into many dimensions, including time, but it is usually quashed by sensory signals that define boundaries. Not so in the tank. Relaxation indeed! My mind began opening like a thousand-petal lotus. Excuse the cliche, but that’s the perfect metaphor. I became aware of presences on the fringes of my consciousness, which seemingly drew near as my mind ventured outward, expanding into multidimensional space. I heard a conversation between two people, an everyday chat that I imagined was happening somewhere else in the building where I lay, or perhaps another building nearby. Other beings were sensed in other directions too, at the same time, although direction really had no meaning because I was becoming a manifold multidirectional awareness. My inner observer seemed to remain intact, and I suspected the psychedelic was taking effect, although I experienced no distortions of perception with which it is usually associated. No melting walls or dripping colors or demon faces or elfin laughter; I felt those were all distortions that would happen only if I was trying to engage outer reality—at a party or rock concert, for example—or if my system was also trying to process other chemicals, such as marijuana or alcohol or even food. (I had fasted the previous day and that morning ate only an orange.)
Instead, pure expansion of mind into a boundless space occurred. While the spatial infinity emerged from the shadows (for that is how I felt it occurring), time also dissolved. I sensed an intensity growing around me, a throbbing urgency that may have been my own blood coursing through my veins, or some endocrinal system kicking in, but all that got left behind as I telescoped out onto a quick succession of larger cosmic viewpoints. The previous domain, which I thought was immense, was quickly seen to be a mere speck on a stick on a tree in a forest on an island on a planet in a galaxy, which was only one galaxy of trillions. A kind of apotheosis or upward-expanding experience that was intimately involved with my very being, my sense of self, accelerated. Suddenly the darkness simply wasn’t dark anymore, but light, pure unmodified light that spread in all directions and through me. Boundless, infinite, and eternal: I am. Or rather, I had once congealed out from this and was now returning into it with some semblance of a memory-making self-consciousness that was nevertheless quickly being subsumed into the light. I suppose, in retrospect, that the light was also love, but at this stage the experience was very much a pure-light illumination, perhaps the “dawning of the clear light” spoken of in the Tibetan Book of the Dead
I was at an attenuated stage of experiencing an ultimate vision of reality; I could see within it the process of history and time, of the creation of the manifest cosmos and created beings, and in one fell swoop the purpose and destiny of humanity unfolded before me and was gone, imprinting me with a knowing that would take a million books to adequately convey. I have preserved in my notebook something that sounds as banal now as it was profound then: “The purpose of life is to grow!” The mystic identity of “Thou Art That,” of identification with the All, began to turn into a feeling of intense ecstasy, of love. Oceans of tears streamed from my heart while a thousand emotions flooded my being in quick succession. Washing over the entire kaleidoscopic panorama was a feeling that God is All, All is God, All is Love, love is all you need, love is all you are. I felt a universal compassion for all beings —these words come to mind now, but I am aware of how trite they must sound and how inadequately they convey the inner ecstasy that my immersion in bliss conferred. I’m condensing this recollection from my notebooks, and at this point I wrote “and then I disappeared.”
Who knows where I went; full identity immersion in eternity extinguishes the “little I” and nothing can be brought back. But there are a million dimensions of being between heaven and hell, between ego and eternity. What I recall next is that, far from any sense of connection with my body or my ego identity, I awoke within a dream in which I was a Chinese man around the turn of the last century. This wasn’t, however, merely a hallucination. In fact, nothing in this experience could really be rightly called a hallucination. I lived out the life of that man. I was that Chinese man and experienced every little thing he had, day after day and year after year. I had first memories, fell in love, got married, had kids, experienced heartache and a million other things that we all register through our lives, and I grew old and died. It wasn’t a speedy overview, either, like a flashback in a near-death experience—it happened in real time. And what I brought back to document when I wrote it down in my notebook was not names and details, but karmic impressions, defining moments, wounds and joys. These are the things that define us.
I then was released into a transhuman realm of being, and I drifted into imagistic reveries involving primordial forests and vast expanses of geological time that occurred as a life cycle of some higher being that I also was. Imagine the life cycle of an entire grove of redwood trees. Some of these groves have been in existence for millions of years. If there is some higher entelechy or ongoing “beingness” of this grove of trees, think of the repository of memories that it holds, or roots, into the earth! Wonder upon wonder unfolded in cosmogonic symphonies before my inner eye. Eventually, my full stride of bold forward motion began to ease. The long journey started to downshift. Ever so subtly, shadows started to creep in; odd angles and question marks began distracting me. I was decelerating now and was about to “come down” into my ego-identity as John. Family faces began appearing, personal thoughts, pathos, compassion, memories, events, disappointments, personal traumas—in broad sweeps I became reacquainted with the knot of karma that is my current incarnation. I could bathe the causal knot of each experience in a compassionate kiss as it passed by, embracing many things that were squirreled away in the recesses of my psyche. I felt this reintegration was a very important part of the entire experience, in which I could recalibrate my identity and reconfigure priorities, goals, motivations, and intentions for my life.
As I was drawn back to the local galaxy, to earth and my waiting body, I remembered I was lying in the isolation tank, a vision box for my underworld journey. I also felt I had never really left my body; I had, rather, explored the cosmic contents of it. Humor percolated into my mind; I began to feel reconnected into my body, and after a while I decided to move a finger. Then a hand, then an arm. The exquisite feel of muscles contracting and blood coursing was as physically pleasurable as the previous mental and spiritual ecstasies I had soared through. After much stretching and moving, getting reestablished into the physical space of my body, I sat up in the box and opened my eyes. Or at least I thought I was opening my eyes. There was no difference between open and closed. I was, in fact, staring out into limitless velvet depths of infinitude. My mind was opened down to the ultimate ground, which was no ground at all but a boundless depth. I was in awe; as the jaw drops in wonder at some fascinating sight, my mind was dropped open in a reverential awesomeness that no word could express. And it was more than some philosophical idea of an alive and bright plenum of infinite space and time. My eyes were actually gazing upon
